A Clock with a Mirror Face, Presented to a Lady
Because the hemispheres of day and night
Succeed each other faster than they might,
And in that interchange of night and day
The lumens of thy beauty wear away,
I give thee, measure of a smoother change,
A little world the dark cannot derange;
That substitutes, for circling of the sun,
Slow wheels that turn all moments into one;
That marks the interdicts, the pomps of time,
With non-committal click and neutral chime,
Till change, diffused through uniform degrees,
Diminishes in wastes of litotes.
Turn therefore, with thy fragile beauty fast,
From transiences where beauty cannot last;
From where a chronometric universe
Clocks beauty's passing and is beauty's hearse.
Turn from the frictions of the flesh and bone
And contemplate denatured change alone.
Look only in this numbered mirror face
And find a timepiece that cannot erase,
Where fixed an instant beauty's image stands
Passed over carelessly by time's two hands.
Structure
22 lines · 2 stanzas